I'm in shock I guess. Locked in a limbo of emotions. They're all fighting among each other, trying to gain purchase to exert their dominance and tell me what I'm feeling now. I've been staring at this tablet, this blank white space for an hour. I've wasted the battery. I'm using the other one. Thankfully, it was charged.
Before I get into what happened today, let me finish writing what I left off before the cellar doors opened. I've already typed in what I wrote on the paper from last night. When I stopped writing, it was because I heard the padlock being unlocked. The chains were pulling from their handles and a sack was being dropped on the ground as the gates were open. At that precise moment, I crouched and hid next to the staircase letting the darkness hide me. When this man, this human monster, came down the stairs, I lept up like a viper and swung at his calf with my scythe. His leg gave out and tumbled down the rest of the steps.
At that point, I didn't bother looking to see who he was. I bolted up the steps, closed the doors, fed the chain through the handles and locked the padlock. I ran to the house, but I found no one. I called out to them, Hector, Jonathan, Kat, Sandra. No response. I needed to know where they were. I wanted to grab Carmello's old Alligator, but the machete was no where to be found. I suddenly remembered I left the bat in the ambulance. That actually would be more fun to work with, so I ran back to the ambulance to retrieve it, then returned to the cellar after grabbing some twine I found in the house. It was time for an interrogation.
The keys were still in the padlock, which saved me from having to pry the handles off the doors. I wanted to keep him locked in there and let him rot, but I needed to know what he did with my people. I opened the door and stepped back as he immediately tried to lunge at me with a much larger scythe than I used to slice his calf muscle open. He tried to take another swing, and he hooked my bat instead. In turn, I swung the bat quickly to the left pulling the scythe out of his hands. The momentum brought him splashing down face first on the stairs. I hit him the head with the bat to knock him out, and then tied him down to a chair I found.
I waited for him to wake up, and he woke with a smile. He was crazed. He didn't know who he used to be. He was someone else now. He said his name was Torsten Bergqvist, obviously Swedish from his accent. He stared at me with eyes that were almost demonic. I immediately went to work on him, hitting him the flesh of his stomach, not too hard, just to let him know what was about to come. He coughed, then laughed and spat in my face. I started asking him questions. Where was Kat and Sandra? Hector and Jonathan? He laughed some more and we began developing a pattern quickly. He'd laugh with no answer. I'd hit his kneecap. He'd laugh with no answer again. I'd hit his other kneecap. The cycle continued with me batting random parts of his body.
Since the bat wasn't working, I reached for the corkscrew on the rack and said I was going to treat him like a bottle of wine if he didn't start talking. He remained silent, so I grabbed his head and jammed the pointed end of the corkscrew into his cheek and began turning. I felt the corkscrew bite on his teeth, but I kept turning. He began screaming, and I stopped. It was too painful for him to talk with the corkscrew in his mouth, so I forcibly removed it to let him talk. He told me Jonathan and Hector were chained up in the silo and Kat was locked in the bottom of a half full rain reservoir. He didn't mention Sandra, so I yelled at him, "WHERE'S SANDRA?! WHERE'S THE LITTLE GIRL!?"
He motioned with his head outside, laughing and spitting out blood. At first, I didn't know what he meant, but then he said, "The sack." The bat slid out of my hand hitting the floor, and my jaw would have too had it not been connected to my skull. Stunned with disbelief, I didn't know whether to kill this man outright or check the sack, but I immediately ran to the sack and froze solid as a block of ice. The sack had spots all about it, clearly blood seeping through it. My hands and arms were seized with tremors as I started to reach for the string. My fingers couldn't manage the task of untying the not, until I somehow got it undone. I opened the sack and there she was... sweet Sandra... artist of millions of beautiful flowers...IN FUCKING PIECES!
I must have uttered no a million times. I bellowed. I screamed so loudly out of pain, I might have been a wolf howling at the moon. Revulsion and sadness and sorrow and pain and anger and hatred and loathing and seething all lit up inside me like a boiler. My face stiffened, every muscle distorting itself from the raging pressure increasing deep down below I marched back down into that cellar like Hercules descending into Hades and picked up my bat and cocked it back so far, it was almost where it began, and I swung. I swung with the force of the Olympians and felt the crack of the metal into the bone of his jaw like a thunderbolt thrown from Zeus. He has no jaw anymore. He'd be lucky to have me finish the job. No, his punishment is only beginning.
I somehow managed to walk away from him, my anger still locked onto him as if it were a beam from a lighthouse guiding a ship in from sea. I had to check on everyone else. I headed to the silo first, and found Jonathan and Hector chained against the wall. I hoped their locks used the same key as the cellar doors, so I ran back to get the key and thank God it worked. They where not in good shape. They looked beaten by a professional boxer, and Jonathan looked whipped. Jonathan actually collapsed, so I asked Hector if he was okay enough to help me rescue Kat. He nodded, so we went to the rain reservoir.
The rain reservoir was built into the ground next to where the closest crop was to the house. I saw a grate and yelled down into it, "KAT?" No response, and then I tried again and again and on the fourth call, I heard her. I asked if she was okay, and she said was fine but she needed out. The water was up her chin and she'd been standing for so long. We got the grate open and I dived in, nearly going into shock at how cold the water was. Thinking Kat was down here for hours warmed me with anger. As I grabbed her and helped her up to the opening where Hector was, I noticed her cast was dissolving and the wrapping was coming undone. After Hector got her out, he helped me get out.
We all went back to the house, and I helped Kat dry off but I had no idea what to do with the cast. It was such a mess. I ended up getting some shears and cut the cast off her. I didn't like the fact that her cast was off, but it wasn't doing any good in that condition anyway. She's been in it for more than two weeks, though, and she reported no pain, so as long as she keeps off her leg, she ought to be fine.
Then I teared up as I had to let everyone know what that psycho did to our Sandra! Kat's cries were a mix of torment and outrage and my cries harmonized with hers. Jonathan was so stunned, he has no reaction, while Hector went violent, grabbing things and throwing them around the house, swearing every curse word he knew. That would have been me if I didn't have Kat to cradle.
No one wanted to eat. Hours passed by with us in that house trying to make sense of everything, but we had to do what we didn't want to do. We had to confront that monster in the cellar, the one who took Sandra from us, the Swede Torsten Bergqvist.
He seemed pleased to see us, as if enjoyed more company. His jaw lay hanging from the right side of his face, most of the bottom teeth scattered all over the floor in pieces, some of his upper teeth missing as well. His tongue hung out crookedly. Kat would have fired herself out of her chair as if it were a cannon had it not been for her leg, so she let Hector be the first to charge him. He jumped on him and punched him in what face he still had left, but then I grabbed him and yanked him off. Hector wanted more and actually took a swing at me because I was in the way, but I dodged and restrained him. I told him I had a plan.
We backed up so I could whisper among the remnants of my group, because I didn't want this piece of shit to hear what I was going to do to him. I told them I wanted to test a theory I had, and after hearing that, Kat said, "Let me do it. That son of a bitch is mine." So I let her.
We could have continued to cause him more pain. We could have stripped the flesh off his skin and rubbed lye on his exposed flesh. We could have split his bones apart and hollowed the marrow from them. We could have tied his intestines into knots and force feed him his own excrement. We could have done so many sick things to him, but his current state of mind is crazy enough that he'd probably enjoy it. So what I came up with is something I don't think he'll be able to deal with at all. What I came up with... is actually for science. Kat is my lab partner and Torsten Bergqvist is my lab rat.
I wheeled Kat to Torsten who was trying to so hard to smile but kept making a literal bloody mess of it. I pulled an arm free from his binding and he immediately tried to struggle now that it was free, so I snapped it at the elbow. He cried out in pain, but started laughing, which sounded sicker with his broken jaw. He didn't laugh at what happened next. I gave the arm to Kat, and she held it like one would hold a rack of ribs, and she bit into him. She bit until her teeth drew blood, and then she spat his blood into his face. His eyes went wide as he suddenly realized the hypothesis we were testing.
Now we wait, While we wait, we will bury a girl would could very well have been our own daughter. We say goodbye to the best part of this post-apocalyptic world that we're in; a truly gifted and unique flower. Kat made a tongue depressor cross as best as she could. Even though I said it was beautiful, we both know it couldn't do Sandra's justice.
Until tomorrow. It will be Torsten Bergqvist's last.
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